


No Good Deed

by leoandlancer



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Talking like real adults, They were almost something more, because lets face it these are some violent boys, between killing people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 17:37:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17564990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandlancer/pseuds/leoandlancer
Summary: Soldier76 is just picking something up on his way through. Reaper wasn't at all prepared for what he had come to collect.Written for the They Loved Each Other Zine.





	No Good Deed

**Author's Note:**

> This was a piece I did for the wonderful [They Loved Each Other Zine](https://theylovedeachotherzine.tumblr.com/)!  
> I hope you enjoy it.

The damp stone ceiling above Soldier:76 wasn’t a great view. He was mostly dead, and while that was distressingly familiar, it still hurt, and there were better places to be mostly dead than under a damp pile of ancient stone.   

Without moving more than necessary, he fetched the bionic emitter with his unbroken fingers and found the strength to activate it. A pool of warm energy spread out around him, and he subsided into immobility. 

His mind reeled back through the triage of his injuries. Nothing unusual. Bullet holes, two worryingly-deep gashes from a partially serrated knife, a couple of breaks. 

Which…how the hell had he broken his fingers? He hadn’t let anyone break his fingers for him in years. So, why…right. He was home. 

An ancient sentinel fort stood on the uncertain borders of two mountain-bound countries. It was isolated enough that it was rarely manned, and had to resort to infrared beacons to communicate. A good place for a safehouse. 

It had been, anyway. Before, when he could fly in. Without an ORCA, it had been a miserable two-day hike over the half-frozen goat paths while vultures circled overhead. But the castle had been right where he’d left it.

Soldier had gone fifty-two hours without sleep. Hadn’t eaten in ten. He was in a hurry and in no mood to deal with the current occupants. Gun runners, probably supplying both sides of a civil war or something. Typical. 

He’d killed three guards on his way in and scaled the bastion walls to break into the commander’s office at the top of the tower. There’d been a trap door in this room. Unopened, apparently for centuries. 

That’s where he had allowed himself to be arrested. Which is to say, full-body tackled by three furious mercenaries. Then questioned. Which hadn’t gone well for anyone. It was a low point for everyone involved when trained mercenaries with military experience had to resort to a desk drawer to break fingers.

“This must be the right place, if you’re here.” 

That voice. Jack Morrison was twenty-six years old again, standing to attention with Gabriel Reyes beside him trying not to grin. 

Soldier sat upright and clipped the emitter to the side of his belt. There was a heap of rags and bone in the cell on his left, and a shadow in the cell on his right. A shadow almost as familiar as his own. It moved, and the edges of the mask shone bone-white in the faint light.

Soldier looked straight back, two masks dividing their common history. “What are you doing here?” 

In the next cell, Reaper shrugged.  “Same as you.”

Soldier couldn’t quite see the tilt of his head, but his memory filled it in for him. “It’s nice how we still seem to do everything together.”

“Habit’s a hell of a thing to break.” 

“Not what I was asking though. What are you doing here?” 

“I told you—” 

Soldier got painfully to his feet and turned to face Reaper from his full height. “You lost your damn mind?” 

Reaper stood to give the wide-armed shrug Soldier remembered perfectly. Then he stepped over so they were separated by a stand of rusting iron bars and only enough space to draw breath.

Deliberately, Soldier stepped back, widening the gap between them. 

Reaper followed him, his outline blurring into smoke and dust, and passing through the cell bars. Then he became solid again, and Reaper and Soldier had nothing but their masks, a few inches of space, and a lifetime of missed chances and broken promises between them. 

Here they were again. 

“So, what are you doing here.” It wasn’t a question this time, just a quiet growl on the edge of hearing. 

“I know you laid a cache here.” Reaper’s voice was as low as Jack’s had been.

“I never told you that.” 

Reaper shrugged. “You wouldn’t come here if you hadn’t.”  

“Doesn’t Talon usually assign some some young asshole in need of disciplinary action to watch me? Did you piss someone off, or did you want to watch me, personally?” 

“What do you think?” 

Soldier had no idea if that was rhetorical. He ignored it.

“Do you know what I cached here?” 

Reaper shrugged. Clearly anything that was good enough for Soldier to hike two days into inhospitably dangerous mountains was good enough for Talon. 

“You going to try and stop me from taking it?” 

“I’m taking it.” Reaper’s snarl made the air colder between them. 

“Fine,” Soldier shrugged. “You deserve it after all. We have to get to it first.” 

Reaper growled, a low, wordless noise, then he was gone. He left a ring of cold blackness on the floor, spinning like a dust devil. Soldier turned to find him out of the cell, standing at the foot of the short staircase to the guard room. 

“I’ll stay low and quiet, kill anyone who sees me, find a way to get you out, and come back. You show me where you hid that cache and then—” 

Soldier reached around the bars of his cell door, shoved the key into the old lock, and twisted it open. He left the old key in the lock and began climbing the stairs, past Reaper. 

“You had the key.” 

“Broken fingers, remember.” 

“You had,” Reaper said, his exasperation audible, “the  _ key _ .” 

“I pushed the commander to put my hand in his desk drawer. You know I hate having my fingers broken.”

Reaper kept his commentary to himself and Soldier shoved open the door to the guard room. He found one mercenary fast asleep with his feet on the table. Soldier didn’t break stride as he scooped up his confiscated rifle and continued up the stairs. There was a soft snap and a bubbling sigh, then the cold at his back that told him Reaper was following closely. They found several mercenaries at each level as they climbed, and left noticeably fewer when they passed on. 

“Why didn’t you just make your way in like this before?” Reaper asked.

“Didn’t know if the cache was still here. Had to check the commander’s office for that.” 

Soldier kicked the tower's last locked door open and discovered an empty office with a rope tied to the desk and trailing out the window. 

“Sensible commander,” Soldier remarked, watching the rope twitch and jerk against the stone window ledge. “I would have had a wire cable ready though,” he added as Reaper cut the rope. 

“You wouldn’t have let a vigilante and a mercenary in,” Reaper countered, ignoring the scream from outside the window, fading at the rate of human terminal velocity. 

“I let you in when I was commander.” Soldier knelt by the trap door, and scraped at the edges with a knife. 

“You couldn’t have kept me out.” 

“No,” Soldier agreed, aiming carefully then stabbing down with practiced violence. “I wouldn’t have gone on without you.” 

Reaper leaned against the windowsill, watching Soldier with his arms crossed. “You were better off when you were without me.” 

“No.” Soldier patiently chiseled out epoxy, cement, and the dust of centuries from around the trap door. “Just would’ve had a longer career.” 

Reaper snorted. 

“Anyway, what would either of us have have been without each other?” He levered out a chunk of cement, breaking the tip of his knife in the process. “We only made it to command because we didn’t let the other die.” 

“Hindsight’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it.” 

Soldier didn’t reply. He chipped away the last of the cement and dust, then pulled on the iron ring of the trap door and heaved it open. 

There was a tiny nook he’d built, lined in lead and steel and modern stonework. Jack Morrison had been a thorough man when he’d taken this as a safehouse. 

“Help yourself,” Soldier shrugged, leaving the door wedged open on rusted hinges. 

Reaper stepped over carefully, and crouched down over the cache. 

There wasn’t much. A compact device, a heavy paper ledger, a tablet, some rations, first aid kit, a dormant battery bank, a small collection of weapons, a go-bag. Soldier could remember Jack Morrison packing that bag. A just-in-case in a world full of unexpected dangers. 

Soldier knelt next to Reaper and stared down in silence. This felt like an exhumation. Reaper reached down and checked the weapons, the battery bank, the box of army rations. He pulled out the ledger and cracked it open. 

Jack Morrison should have burned it. Soldier could recognize that now. 

“I didn’t know you kept Blackwatch’s books on paper,” Reaper said. 

“Harder to trace,” Soldier said, Jack Morrison’s rationale finding a voice decades too late. “Even during the height of the inquest, they didn’t know how much Blackwatch was involved in. All their estimations fell pathetically short.” 

“It was still more than enough to hang us.” Reaper dumped the ledger to one side. An accumulated decade of patient work that Jack Morrison had undertaken in secret to protect Gabriel Reyes. 

Soldier just nodded.

The tablet was a vault of recordings. Every interview that Blackwatch had overseen, every interrogation, every glimpse of Blackwatch caught on security camera, every hastily-snapped cell phone picture. 

“You got these?” Reaper asked. 

“And got rid of the originals. Damage-control was one of my many duties.” Soldier shrugged. “Shame you never tried it.” 

“You had it under control.” 

“We both know that’s a damn lie.” 

“Good effort, though.” Reaper flicked through the pictures. A decade of Gabriel Reyes in armor and his beanie and the smug little smile. 

Soldier kept still. He was still staring at the bag Jack Morrison had packed. Stupid, naive, hopeful Jack Morrison, his hands shaking as he stuffed cash and passports into a brown envelope.  

“Why were you following me, Reaper?” 

“Someone had to watch you. You kept shaking the tails we sent.” 

“I think I trained half of them,” Soldier said. “Before they joined Blackwatch and you recycled them into Talon.”

“Waste not.” Reaper took out the compact device.

It was old, outdated, but the holographic screen sprang up and showed a framework for a powerful EMP device that would cripple all electronics for a day and a half. Maybe more. 

“I thought you didn’t allow these,” Reaper said. 

“I didn’t. Shut down every electronic system and render every omnic senseless in a two-kilometer radius? It’s a terrorist’s weapon.” 

Reaper carefully set it aside, then went still.

“Why’d you let me follow you, Soldier?” His voice dropped again, so low and so rough it was almost a snarl. 

“I didn’t train you,” Soldier replied. “We just trained together.” 

“So you knew I was your tail. Why come here then?” 

Soldier didn’t say anything.

“Jack—” That snarl and this time, Soldier cut him off. 

“Open the bag.”

Reaper didn’t move. Soldier kept just as still beside him. 

They were close enough their shoulders were touching at every breath. 

“This was the last place you came before the fall,” Reaper said. He sounded far away, like an echo from years past. “You came to Switzerland from here.” 

“It was a good safehouse,” Soldier replied. 

Reaper reached into the cache and pulled the bag out. 

It was a small duffel, unremarkable save for its contents. Civilian clothes for Jack Morrison, all secondhand and broken in so they wouldn’t stand out. And a second outfit in darker tones and a different cut. There were gemstones stitched into the collar of both shirts. A ring in the left-hand pockets of both pairs of pants.

Reaper pulled a dark blue beanie from the bag and held it for a beat. He dumped the clothes aside and found the long, brown envelope Jack Morrison had thrown together. Enough cash to go a long way and stay there comfortably for a while. A few small gold ingots, another fortune. A passport with Jack Morrison’s picture and a name that wasn’t his. A second passport with Gabriel Reyes’ picture…

Soldier was close enough that he could feel it when Reaper stopped breathing. Close enough that Jack Morrison’s heart broke all over again for Gabriel Reyes. 

Reaper’s clawed thumb nearly pierced the passport. A picture of Gabriel Reyes looked up from decades ago, a different man with a lot more to lose than he had now.

The same last name on both passports.

“I went to Switzerland to get you, bring you here,” Soldier said. “I thought…hell, I don’t know. I was crazy. Didn’t see it coming. Couldn’t have see what you were up to if you’d laid it out for me on paper. Not then. Took me a while, even after.” 

They fell silent again. There was a letter in the envelope that Soldier remembered Jack Morrison writing in a spiral-bound notepad on his lap. He didn’t remember what it said. He remembered struggling to end it. Remembered Jack Morrison desperately scribbling out a list of safehouses and contacts, an explanation, an apology, a goodbye. The confession he had wanted to make for years.

Soldier remembered Jack Morrison fighting back tears when he’d stuffed it into the envelope and dropped the duffle into the cache and sealed it in. The stupid, naïve, hopeful son of a bitch that he was.

“You really thought I’d be the one more likely to make it out of Switzerland, didn’t you?” Reaper said. He held onto the letter and couldn’t stop staring at his face on the passport. 

“I just thought I was much more likely to get assassinated,” Soldier, tactical genius at large, pointed out with unruffled pragmatism. “I wasn’t wrong.” 

“No,” Reaper, profligate assassin, couldn’t help but agree. “You weren’t wrong about that.” 

“Just everything else.” Soldier reached over and took the four small ingots of gold. Most of the cash was too old to be useful, but the gold market was as reliable as commerce itself. 

“Why?” 

Soldier stood and listened to the familiar salvo his knees and back cracking. “Why what? Why didn’t Jack Morrison see what Gabriel Reyes was doing?” 

“Why the hell did  _ Soldier:76 _ show this to  _ Reaper _ ?” Reaper snarled, making both names into curses. He looked up at Soldier, who shrugged.

“I needed the gold. Vigilantism pays more than honest work, but only barely.” 

“No, you wanted me to see—” Reaper stood in a gust of cold air and the tail of his coat flashed out wide. For a moment, he seemed large enough to fill the room. 

“Why the hell do you think I was so blind, Gabe?” Jack Morrison spoke quietly from behind Soldier’s mask. The room went quiet and Jack Morrison went on. “Why the hell do you think I wanted you to see this? I did everything in my power to protect you. Then I found out exactly how much damage I’d done giving you so little oversight. I could have never seen what you did coming.” 

Reaper just stood there, his coat settling around him, his blurred outline becoming crisp again. 

“I’ve tracked you before, Jack. Why bother to show me this now?” Gabe’s voice was so rough and low and familiar, it kicked something in Jack's gut that made him tense with an old misery. 

“I keep enough secrets. This one did no one any good.” Jack backed away a step, moved to the window to look out without turning his back to Gabe. There was a whine of a distant engine on the edge of his hearing.

“Jack, twenty years ago you were ready to drop everything and disappear with me,” Gabe said quietly. “The hell good does that do for either of us now?”

“Same as it did before. None.” 

Outside, the shape of a dropship appeared over the line of the mountains, closing fast on the fort. 

“Well, we missed someone on our way up. They called for help.” Soldier ruthlessly buried Jack Morrison again and hefted his rifle. “That’s my ride. You?” 

Reaper shook his head, his voice still low. “I have what I need.” 

“Sure.” Soldier turned his back to him, heading for the door. “Good luck with the EMP, though. It’s locked.” 

“Take the damn thing with you then,” Reaper snarled after him.

Soldier shook his head. “No use to me. It just needs a key, Reaper. Show some initiative.” 

Reaper stood listening to the echo of Jack Morrison clattering down stone stairs toward a deployment of disorganized and poorly-trained mercenaries. He’d have the dropship safely hijacked within the hour. 

In the commander’s office, Reaper dropped back down to a crouch and stayed perfectly still as a firefight began below. There were years of Jack Morrison’s devotion here. Years of proof that Gabriel Reyes would never have believed. 

The shooting below trailed off, then stopped abruptly, as a few desperate voices barked out their surrender. The dropship’s engine roared as it departed, and Reaper was left alone in the fort.

He waited until all fell silent, then he began cramming everything into the duffle bag. The old passports, the old ledger in Jack Morrison’s handwriting, the clothes, the defunct currency. He stuffed Jack’s letter into an inner pocket of his armor, trying to ignore how the pages shook when he held them. At last he hesitated, holding the locked EMP. It was a useful little thing, built by Jack Morrison himself. One get-out-of-fuck-up-free, a hell of a declaration. Just needed a key.

He turned, his gaze pulled by Soldier’s words, and looked at the bloody edge of the commander’s desk drawer. In went the EMP. Nothing was left behind. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Working on this zine was wonderful and everyone involved was amazing. This was a great experience. Please check out the zine at their [Tumblr](https://theylovedeachotherzine.tumblr.com/)!


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